Corporate Environmental Pacts: Towards a New Organising Concept for Corporate-Led Voluntary Sustainability Initiatives

This paper proposes a new organising category for research into green or climate clubs. I argue that there is a research gap around how corporate actors govern each other, and why voluntary governance relationships are sought by governing actors and those businesses governed. Furthermore, the relationship between voluntary corporate environmental clubs and techniques of certification deserves renewed attention in the age of social media-dominated communications. In response, I propose corporate environmental pacts. Pacts are voluntary initiatives which encourage business members to ‘take action’, then certify those actions, market those actions and build virtual communities. I substantiate this organising concept in dialogue with literature on transnational climate governance and club theory. The paper investigates two pacts – 1% for the Planet (co-founded by Patagonia) and The Climate Pledge (co-founded by Amazon). Though diverging in scale and method, these initiatives have in common a dual purpose of governing member behaviour and enhancing the image of member companies to stakeholders such as consumers and investors. Governmentality theory is used to investigate how member conduct is conducted by the pacts and how pacts offer members, and themselves strive for, legitimacy. An ‘analytics of government’ discourse analysis has been conducted on 14 interviews which I held with staff from the two pacts and their members, as well as on all Instagram posts and blogs produced by the two pacts between 2019 and 2024. I argue that the two pacts have differing models for enacting change, reflecting their respective founding actors and audiences. However, both facilitate members taking real forms of action which, regardless of their substantialness, do allow the brands to communicate credibly about their environmental values and ambitions. In this way, pacts make interventions into the social world, discursively embedding brands into sustainability transitions. These efforts attempt to increase the legitimacy of pacts and their members, whilst also feeding back into the pacts’ governance of their members. Pacts, I argue, take on many of the operating functions usually associated with states or international organisations, including knowledge-sharing, training and even forms of private-private orchestration.